Shakespeare’s hustle
If you thought a global pandemic – resulting in many people dying, economic devastation and collective fear and uncertainty about the future – could save you from hustle culture, you are mistaken.
On 13 March 2020, writer and musician Rosanne Cash tweeted: “Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he wrote
King Lear.” Her comment was retweeted about 60,000 times, gained 245,000 likes and roughly 3,000 replies, and at the time, started an online conversation about work ethic during lockdown, physical distancing and quarantine. Not long after Cash’s tweet, Tim O’Brien, a former senior campaign adviser to US presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg, tweeted: “If social distancing is getting you down, just remember that Shakespeare most likely wrote King Lear, Macbeth, and Anthony and Cleopatra during a plague-inspired quarantine between early 1605 and late 1606.”
There are numerous examples of online posts, articles, messages and tweets about how one should have been productive during the Covid-19 lockdown.
In a piece titled “All the Ways the Internet is Pushing Hustle Culture during Quarantine”, writer Rachel Charlene Lewis demonstrated how doing nothing is not encouraged, even during an international pandemic.
Many of us have oscillated between fear and anxiousness, optimism, sadness, and searching for comfort. It was important then and still is today to address our needs, whatever they may be, to take care of ourselves and nothing more.
There are numerous examples of online posts, articles, messages and tweets about how one should be productive during the lockdown or if one is self-isolating. These messages are not confined to the US – the birthplace of hustle culture. Even here in South Africa, hustle culture persists, accompanied by its usual dose of billionaire worshipping and making a religion of positive thinking. In fact, several messages of “inspiration” have reminded us that staying positive is what differentiates you from others and that there are always opportunities, even in crisis, as during the last global recession, when some people became very, very wealthy.
In the context of discussing Shakespeare’s “work ethic” and social media as ground zero for peddling hustle culture, Lewis states: “Beyond these needless comparisons to one of history’s most beloved playwrights, pushing hustle culture – offering tips for doing more work remotely and telling recently laid-off employees how to leverage their newfound time off – only serves to illustrate the bizarre ways those of us who are not millionaires and billionaires are encouraged to sacrifice our health for a dollar. We needed sick time to truly recover from the physical, emotional and mental toll that Covid-19 is wreaking on all of us, not to finally write that book proposal or kick off that side gig.”
If you are lucky enough to not know what hustle culture is or you simply need a reminder of its idiocy: hustle culture is the belief that you can only succeed by exerting yourself at a maximum capacity professionally. Everything you do must somehow be linked to, or in the service of, productivity.
Hustle culture is results-orientated. It is ambition as a lifestyle. It is about action, grit and progress. It is about never stopping and never giving up on your goals. Every failure only makes you stronger and so on and so on. Having one job isn’t enough, you have to have multiple income streams, and passions and hobbies should be profitable. If it doesn’t serve a goal, it’s irrelevant. Even worse, it’s a waste of time.
In an influential New York Times article in 2019, Erin Griffith states: “I saw the greatest minds of my generation log 18-hour days – and then boast about #hustle on Instagram.” In the context of the cultivation of hustle, she asks: “When did performative workaholism become a lifestyle?”
And it is performative indeed – it has become very difficult to escape hustle culture as every moment is photographed and shared online in an effort to show how virtuous one’s work ethic is. For Griffith, hustle culture is a swindle – “convincing a generation of workers to beaver away is convenient for those at the top”.
Further, although research has shown that long hours don’t improve productivity or creativity, “myths about overwork persist because they justify the extreme wealth created for a small group of techies”.
Some hustle influencers do advocate for self-care – of course, this is only to the extent that people need some sleep and exercise to stay healthy, so that they can hustle further and reach their life’s purpose: usually some commercially crafted goal.
What hustle culture is really about is the “surrender of everything to market forces and the sacrifice of all life to consumer culture,” writes David Masciotra in The Atlantic.
He further asserts that even though hustle culture might at times be enriching and energising, it is ultimately empty, depressing and destructive.
Although routine, productivity and work may help some people alleviate their anxiety during the coronavirus crisis, feeling guilty because you are not designing an app, doing a course in digital marketing, starting a business, or writing some of the best plays ever written, will only be detrimental to your health and wellbeing. Many of us will oscillate between fear and anxiousness, optimism, sadness and searching for comfort. We will need to address our needs, whatever they may be and take care of ourselves, nothing more.
Several authors have suggested strategies to resist hustle culture and its effects, such as burnout and depression. Suggestions range from doing nothing, to finding more meaningful pursuits, to focusing on relationships, family and passions.
Hustle culture, apart from ignoring vast systemic inequalities in part created by modern ideas of progress and individualism (some people have no option but to hustle and is it possible to hustle when your most basic human needs aren’t met?), it also reduces life to getting and spending. There is no time left for sadness, reflection, slowness, and activities imbued with love – values much needed in times of crisis.
In writing a manifesto for “Slow Thought”, psychiatrist Vincenzo di Nicola writes: “We must challenge the notion of development at all stages of life, and imagine the course of life differently than through speed or milestones.”
This requires practices that have no object, no measurable result “that allow us to live more fully in an atemporal present, freed from the burden of an imperfect past or the futile promise of a redemptive future”. In other words, do whatever sings to you.
We must challenge the notion of development at all stages of life, and imagine the course of life differently than through speed or milestones.